Famous conductor compares management styles

This is my favorite thing that I filmed on my trip to Israel a few weeks back for FastCompany.tv.

What is it? It’s a session at the Kinnernet event (which is Yossi Vardi’s famous annual event that attracts geeks and entrepreneurs from around the world to spend a weekend hearing new ideas and creative approaches to living life). Thank you Yossi Vardi for inviting me to participate in this remarkable event — how remarkable was it? Well this is the event where Craig Newmark was my roommate (founder of Craig’s List).

Who gave this talk? Itay Talgam, an internationally-renowned conductor. Now, it’s not every day that I get to meet a musical conductor, not to mention talking about him on my blog. “But I thought you only talked about tech, Scoble,” I can hear many of you saying. Well, that’s true, but, heck, gotta change the rules sometimes otherwise things get too boring and predictable.

Anyway, this got the most raves of the sessions I heard about (several people have seen this talk several times in the audience).

What does he do? He studies the managerial styles of several of the world’s top orchestral conductors and lets you draw conclusions of what kind of managerial style works best for them.

During the talk I saw in myself the stupid things I was doing as a manager, which is pretty much his point and why he’s asked to give this talk around the world.

Because it is so long we split it up into three pieces (the whole thing is more than an hour). Part I and II are up now, but part III will come later today. Hope you enjoy something a little different today.

Here’s the videos: Part I and Part II. Because I was having to film this myself without an audio crew, and had to stay to the side, sometimes I don’t have good audio or a good angle with the camera, but I don’t think those things get in the way of why this was fun.

Well I learnt that it’s easy to conjure up fake archetypes and then fill in your own new-agey definition of reality, giving examples of each, create your own world and then Lord dominion over it, a common enough Business Management fad, a new one a week.

This guy really needs to nail down his points, long-winded, redundant and frankly boring, and the accent (“um um” and “huh” all over the place) and body language/crowd questions and gimmicks doesn’t translate well into video. Instead of breaking into 3 pieces, break it into one, main points, with soft-swooshy fade to whites.

“Knowing how people grow, for example, does not mean we know how to grow them. Experts in child development are no better than anyone else at raising their own children.” – Richard Farson “Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership”

Well I learnt that it’s easy to conjure up fake archetypes and then fill in your own new-agey definition of reality, giving examples of each, create your own world and then Lord dominion over it, a common enough Business Management fad, a new one a week.

This guy really needs to nail down his points, long-winded, redundant and frankly boring, and the accent (“um um” and “huh” all over the place) and body language/crowd questions and gimmicks doesn’t translate well into video. Instead of breaking into 3 pieces, break it into one, main points, with soft-swooshy fade to whites.

“Knowing how people grow, for example, does not mean we know how to grow them. Experts in child development are no better than anyone else at raising their own children.” – Richard Farson “Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership”